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Evaluation of tree injury often begins with a loss assessment. For winter storm injury, percent crow loss or branch breakage is often estimated. For injury from fire or some mechanical source to the lower trunk, the height and width of the killed vascular cambium and resulting scar are often measured. Both crown breakage and stem wounds provide the opportunity for...

A new software tool has been developed to simulate surface wind speed and direction at the 100m to 300 m scale. This tool is useful when trying to estimate fire behavior in mountainous terrain. It is based on widely used computational fluid dynamics technology and has been tested against measured wind flows. In recent years it has been used to support fire management...

Context: Availability of public neighborhood parks is associated with physical activity. Little is known about how parks contribute to population energy balance. Purpose: This study estimated energy expenditure associated with the use of neighborhood parks and compared energy expenditure by activity areas within parks and by neighborhood race/ethnicity and income....

Escape routes are essential components of wildland firefighter safety, providing pre-defined pathways to a safety zone. Among the many factors that affect travel rates along an escape route, landscape conditions such as slope, lowlying vegetation density, and ground surface roughness are particularly influential, and can be measured using airborne light detection and...

The ability to quantify understory vegetation structure in forested environments on a broad scale has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of wildlife habitats, nutrient cycling, wildland fire behavior, and wildland firefighter safety. Lidar data can be used to model understory vegetation density, but the accuracy of these models is impacted by factors...

Residential losses associated with wildland fires have become a serious international fire protection problem. The radiant heat flux from burning vegetation adjacent to a structure is a principal ignition factor. A thermal radiation and ignition model estimated structure ignition potential using designated flame characteristics (inferred from various types and...

The decay of coarse woody debris is a key component in the formation of forest soil and in the biogeochemical cycles of Ca and Mg. We tracked changes in density and concentration of Ca and Mg in sapwood of red maple (Acer rubrum L.), red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.), paper birch (Betula papyrifera Marsh.), and...

By now the statistics are all too familiar: rates of obesity and incidents of related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and depression have reached epidemic proportions among US adults and children. These conditions have been linked along with other factors such as nutrition to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles brought on by changes in technology in our...

The present study is aimed at quantifying the flame radiosity vertical profile and gas temperature in moderate to high intensity spreading fires in shrubland fuels. We report on the results from 11 experimental fires conducted over a range of fire rate of spread and frontal fire intensity varying respectively between 0.04-0.35ms-1 and 468-14,973kWm-1. Flame radiosity,...

One of the fundamental skills needed for hazard tree assessment is the evaluation of decay. This may be a difficult task as we usually only use external symptoms (wounds, basal swellings, decayed branch stubs), signs (mushrooms, fungal crusts or brackets) or mechanical/indirect sampling methods (drilling, electrical or sonic resistance) to estimate the amount of sound...

The wildfires that burned in the Northern Rockies region of the USA during the 2017 fire season provided an opportunity to evaluate the suitability of using broadscale and temporally limited infrared data on hot spot locations to determine the influence of several environmental variables on spotting distance. Specifically, correlations between the maximum observed spot...

The 606 is the world's first multiuse elevated trail, extending for 2.7 mi (4.35 km) through diverse neighborhoods whose per capita of open space is one of the lowest in Chicago. The trail connects six ground-level parks and is managed for recreation, but it also serves as a cross-town transportation connector and was funded partially with transportation dollars....

Wildland firefighters in the US are mandated to identify areas that provide adequate separation between themselves and the flames (i.e. safety zones) to reduce the risk of burn injury. This study presents empirical models that estimate the distance from flames that would result in a low probability (1 or 5%) of either fatal or non-fatal injuries. The significant...

A special test arrangement was used to assess the flammability of 4 different wood plastic composites (WPC), most with fire retardants, all of which has a tendency to high smoke production leading to high radiant energy losses to the apparatus walls. The mass loss calorimeter (MLC) was modified to include a thermopile on the exhaust pipe stack to compensate for radiant...

A field deployable system for quantifying energy and mass transport in wildland fires is described. The system consists of two enclosures: The first is a sensor/data logger combination package that allows characterization of convective/radiant energy transport in fires. This package contains batteries, a programmable data logger, sensors, and other electronics. The...

The USDA Forest Service National Fire Plan funded a research program to study fire spread in live fuels of the southwestern United States. In the U.S. current operational fire spread models do not distinguish between live and dead fuels in a sophisticated manner because the study of live fuels has been limited. The program is experimentally examining fire spread at 3...

We investigated the variability of the climate-growth relationship of Aleppo pine across its distribution range in the Mediterranean Basin. We constructed a network of tree-ring index chronologies from 63 sites across the region. Correlation function analysis identified the relationships of tree-ring index to climate factors for each site. We also estimated the...

Wildland fire rate of spread (ROS) and intensity are determined by the mode and magnitude of energy transport from the flames to the unburned fuels. Measurements of radiant and convective heating and cooling from experimental fires are reported here. Sensors were located nominally 0.5mabove ground level. Flame heights varied from 0.3 to 1.8 m and flaming zone depth...

Mercury (Hg) is deposited from the atmosphere to remote areas such as forests, but the amount of Hg in trees is not well known. To determine the importance of Hg in trees, we analyzed foliage, bark and bole wood of eight tree species at four sites in the northeastern USA (Huntington Forest, NY; Sleepers River, VT; Hubbard Brook, NH; Bear Brook, ME). Foliar...